Michael Grade today described ITV's £25m disposal of Friends Reunited as the "best price we could get".

The sale of the social networking firm to Brightsolid, a DC Thomson subsidiary, was signed off at 5.01am today, less than two hours before ITV announced its interim results to the City.

However, the price, while higher than the £15m suggested in recent reports on the progress of the Friends Reunited sale, still represented a £150m loss for ITV on what it paid in 2005 and in subsequent earn-outs.

Grade, ITV's executive chairman, distanced himself from the acquisition, which was made under his predecessor, Charles Allen, but did not directly criticise that deal.

"ITV bought it. This management team did not buy it," Grade said. "It was regarded at the time as a good price. But the market has changed dramatically. You may have noticed but there's a recession on. It's the best price we could get."

Grade denied that Friends Reunited had been a missed opportunity for ITV, pointing to the way in which the ITV.com digital business had grown. "The game has changed. Friends Reunited does not fit our strategy," he said.

ITV's chief operating officer, John Cresswell, said revenues from ITV.com had increased by 100% compared with the first half of 2008, and that there had been more viewings of ITV videos in the first six months of this year than in the previous 18 months. (The period of the surge included the phenomenal global internet popularity of Britain's Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle.) Unique users were growing by just under 9 million a month, he added.

Grade said there had been "plenty of interest" in the two other properties ITV has put up for sale, the Freeview multiplex business SDN and the cinema advertising operation Screenvision US.

ITV had no immediate plans to bolster its funding position with a rights issue, he added. "The position absolutely has not changed from what the board said earlier this year," he said. "There are no current plans for a rights issue."

Nor was the company looking to make further job cuts, Cresswell said, having seen 1,000 people leave by the end of June. "But you can never say never," he added, pointing to uncertainty in the advertising market.

ITV has been cheered by a slowdown in the rate of advertising decline, with September network advertising revenue set to be down 7% year on year, an improvement on the 12% average for the third quarter.

But it was too soon to say if this was the start of a meaningful recovery, Cresswell said. "Whilst it's encouraging and the direction of travel is pleasing, there's low visibility," he said.

Investors reacted positively to the results, with ITV shares up more than 3% at 43.3p in early trading today.

The ITV executives were sceptical about the suggestion advanced by UBS analysts that it should move its digital channels off Freeview and make them exclusive to Sky and Virgin's pay-TV services.

Cresswell said that revenues from the digital channels would halve if they were removed from Freeview, so Sky and Virgin would have to pay a significant premium for exclusivity for it to make financial sense to ITV.

"We can't see how the arithmetic of pay really works for the company at the moment, but it's something we are always keeping an eye on," Grade added.

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